


spring had come (with a love song)

by QueenWithABeeThrone



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: (for it not hadestown), Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Horror, F/M, Hadestown AU, M/M, Reconciliation, kinda meta, smashes kingverse and hadestown together for shits and giggles, strained marriage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24324265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/pseuds/QueenWithABeeThrone
Summary: “What’s that song for?” Beverly asked him once, when she found him bent over his desk, building the outlines for his song one cold winter night.“Bringing the spring back,” he said.or: the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice has been sung again and again. this is not a tragedy we sing tonight. ever heard of the Losers, and how they defeated the monster that lived under Derry?well, this is something like that.(a Hadestown AU with Significant changes.)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Richie Tozier/Eddie Kaspbrak
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	1. Livin' It Up On Top

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "Road to Hell (Reprise)" on the Hadestown OBC recording. chapter titles are track titles from the same album.

There’s an old, old story. I think you know of it already: the tale of a singer and his wife, and how close he came to bringing her back from her place six feet under. Orpheus and Eurydice, they’re called, and their story’s always a tragedy. Gets sung over and over again, though, like maybe this time the lovers will win. Maybe this time the doubt won’t come in. Maybe this time he doesn’t look back. Maybe this time she’ll feel the sun again. Maybe this time.

Something to be said for tragedies: even when you know how it’s gonna end you still _hope_ for a happy ending. Even when the singer says up-front, _brother, sister, sibling of mine, this’ll be a sad song,_ you still can’t help it. We’re hopeful creatures like that. We want our stories to be wrapped up all tidy and neat, happy endings all around, because real life is never tidy and neat, and always goes on past the happy ending.

Sad songs remind you: sometimes there’s no happy ending. But there’s hope. That’s the thing about a good tragedy. No matter how many times you tell it, you always hold out hope.

I’m not telling you the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, not tonight. Sometimes it hurts too much to hear a sad song, and I can see it hurts you to hear me talk of tragedies, of singers and dreamers who come so far only to lose. Even if I dress it up all fancy and hopeful. But there is another tale, a different Hadestown from the one we’ve heard before, the one we’ll keep hearing up on that Great White Way. Different name, different people, same routine. Well, almost the same routine.

 _Lot_ more cussing in this one. And a demon clown.

Yeah, they’re always surprised to hear of the demon clown too. Don’t look at me like that. I’m just the storyteller. The messenger, if you will, or at least the fellow at the campfire speaking a tale into the night. Hermes I ain’t, bless that smooth-voiced fellow, all I do is keep the hearth, but I’ll do my best.

Who am I?

My name’s Hestia. I keep the fires going. Days like these, that’s all you can really do.

Sit down, warm your hands by the hearth. I’ll fix you something to fill your belly. And in the meantime…

Have you ever heard of Beverly Marsh and Ben Hanscom? Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak? Stanley Uris, Bill Denbrough, Mike Hanlon? A town called Derry?

Something like that? Well, this tale’s a little different from the one you’ve been told thrice over. Don’t ask me where and when, just know: it was hard times. Now listen well, because once there was a poor young man working on a song, and a woman with a fire in her heart…

\--

Beverly Marsh was a woman who had seen the worst of men. Her daddy looked at her and saw a thing to possess, and the no-good sonofabitch she had once been married to had done the same, and neither of them much liked it when their possessions fought back. But fight back she did, and now those men were dead and she was running free, but running from the cold winds too.

The seasons were out of tune, you see. Spring and fall had all but vanished, and the summer was twice as hot as it had been before, the winter twice as cold. Our girl Bev learned the score by the time she killed her no-good bastard husband: she could never stay in one place too long. Soon enough the supplies would dry up, and she would pack her things up and ride the trains out of town.

She came to Castle Rock with a heart grown hard and a gun with silver bullets tucked away under her jacket. And it was there she met a friend of mine: Ben Hanscom, a dreamer and a singer with a song in his heart, trying to put it into words.

I told you, didn’t I? This song’s a little different from Orpheus and Eurydice, from the Losers of Derry.

Now, Ben loved her from the minute he saw her. He’d stop all he was doing when she walked in through the door, and he’d blush from the moment she talked to him. But he didn’t know how to pluck up the courage to talk to her—never was one for talking to women that he liked this much, that boy. For a singer, he was prone to tripping over his own words when he talked to her. So I took a bit of pity on him.

“Ben, my dear,” I said one day, as he was watching her from across the bar, struck so dumb by love he was pulling his guitar strings too tightly, “you turn that knob any further and your string’s gonna break.”

He jumped, and almost knocked a glass over. “Sorry,” he said, and loosened the string so it didn’t pull so taut.

“What’s ailing you there?” I asked him. “Is it Beverly again?”

And there was that blush again. “Is it that obvious?” he asked.

“Only every time she walks inside,” I told him. “You should go talk to her. Won’t hurt.”

“I can’t just—go up and _talk_ to her, Hes,” said Ben, clutching his guitar close to his chest. He was as flushed as I’d ever seen him. “She’s probably in love with someone else. I mean, look at her.” He waved a hand at her, at that bob of flaming red hair.

“No harm in trying anyway,” I said. “At the very least you’ll make a friend.”

“I’ve got _you_ ,” he said, and heartwarming as that was, it was also a little sad. Bright young man like him needed more friends than an old woman tending a bar in a nothing town, and I told him as much then. He shook his head, and said again, “You’re enough. It’s fine.”

“You’re a lonely man,” I said. “Lonelier since your old woman died. Least you can do is talk to her, fill your days up with her voice.” I looked at Beverly, who’d caught sight of the handsome singer sitting at my bar. Looked like the feeling was mutual, although I didn’t think her heart burned for Ben the way his did for her. At least not at first. “Go on,” I said, nudging his arm. “Go. For an old woman’s sake.”

He went. They talked.

And I’m happy to say, they got on splendidly. So splendidly that she kept coming in just to talk to him, and day after day the flower of love bloomed brighter and hotter in both their hearts. He loved her from the very start, but his love was different from the love our girl Bev had seen before.

You see, the first time he saw her wasn’t in my bar. It was on her way into town, carrying her life in a bag and a gun on her hip. She was walking along, all alone against the sky, a cigarette between her lips, her red hair seeming almost to sparkle in the summer sun. From that moment on, Ben was done for, because he loved her, pure as springwater. He wanted nothing more except to be allowed to spend time in her presence, and anything more was simply a bonus.

In time, she grew to love him, too. He took her to a meadow for a picnic, and there among the flowers she kissed him.

And for a time, why, everything was grand. They moved in together into a little one-story home with a hearth that Beverly kept going, those two, and in the meantime Ben worked on his song.

“What’s that song for?” Beverly asked him once, when she found him bent over his desk, building the outlines for his song one cold winter night.

“Bringing the spring back,” he said. “I think I figured out how I want to structure it, and I’ve got the melody, already, I just need to find the right words.”

“Can I hear it?” she asked.

And Ben could never turn her down. He didn’t know the words, barely even had a structure beyond the most skeletal outline. But he had the melody, and sometimes that’s enough. He sang it to her, on that dark night with the candle burning low: _la la la la la la la._

Outside, the flowers began to bloom again under the bitter snow. Beverly was watching, and she startled at the sight of them opening their buds to the moonlight.

“Oh, _shit_ ,” she said, and pointed. Ben cut himself off, his eyes following the line of her finger to the outside, where their little struggling garden patch was blooming anew. “Ben—you have to finish this song.”

\--

He wasn’t the one who finished it. But I must digress, and tell you of another pair of lovers.

Eddie Kaspbrak came up to town every year, out of that underground paradise or hellhole called Derry. He was a cheery man whenever he came up, and flowers tended to bloom in his wake, but he always came a little too late for the spring and left too early for the fall. You’ve heard the story, I’m sure: man falls in love, man asks lover to come with him to his underground lair, lover comes to stay a while and when lover’s mother comes around, lover eats six pomegranate seeds to be allowed to stay, a little while longer.

But that story was a long time ago.

Another story: there was an ancient evil that one day took up residence, in the very heart of Derry, under a house that used to be a well. Now, this evil, it liked the taste of fear and despair. And it saw that Richie Tozier nursed a secret little fear in his heart of hearts: that Eddie would leave him, and stop loving him. Eddie, too, held a fear of his own: that he would be trapped underground somehow, never to see the sky again. Used to be those were irrational fears, but this evil thing in the heart of Derry—oh, it liked the taste of the lovers’ fear. It started to whisper in Richie’s ear, and sink its claws deep into his heart and harden it against everyone else, the way it did to so many people in Derry.

It didn’t need to work on Eddie very much. But it did, a little bit, simply because it _liked_ to. It wanted to trap him once more in a gilded cage, because he feared it so much, and it loved the taste of his fear. That’s what evil is—sowing fear and discord in a heart, simply because you can. Simply because you have the ability.

So Eddie and Richie’s marriage was going sour. Richie was trying to save it, but the thing knew how to confuse him, how to block his hearing so he didn’t hear Eddie pleading to him. Instead, he tried to turn the underground into something that could rival the world above: glittering lights, whirring machinery that could imitate leaping gazelles and roaring lions and swaying trees, things that weren’t right, that weren’t natural. He gave his husband gifts aplenty, of steel and oil and gems.

All those gifts demanded was the unending, back-breaking labor of the people who lived underneath.

Eddie grew to hate the underground. Grew trapped underneath it, and would always get away for a drink in a speakeasy whenever he could. Eventually he started one himself, under his husband’s nose.

And in the meantime, the people built a wall. Why, no one knew, not even Richie, although it seemed as if the idea had sprung from him. The thing in the heart of Derry laughed to see the wall rising up, higher and higher—people could come in, but the wall meant they couldn’t get out. The wall didn’t keep anyone out. The wall kept them all penned in, like animals in a slaughterhouse, and It had never feasted so well in its long, long life. And all it had to do was poison the ear of a man who loved his husband.

Now, Eddie and Richie had a deal: Eddie would spend half the year underground, with Richie, and then half the year above ground, by himself. It must be said that even when their marriage was sour, though, there was one thing Eddie always asked Richie:

“Hey, you wanna come up with me this time?”

And every time, Richie would answer:

“God, no. I don’t trust this place not to fall apart when I’m not here to keep an eye on shit.”

So Eddie would go up without Richie, sad that his husband was too busy to come up and enjoy the sunshine. And the thing in Derry would slither into Richie’s head and tell him that one day, the sunshine and the fresh air and the blue skies would steal Eddie away from him. No matter what he did, how he tried, one day Eddie would leave him.

It’s funny how fear can warp a person. Richie loved his man, he did. Once upon a time it was sweet and tender, but fear can poison a soul and warp a heart. Richie would push his limits, keeping Eddie just a little too long and asking him to come back just a little too early, and Eddie loved him too much, despite how he hated the underground. We do such terrible things for love—to other people, yes, but to ourselves most of all.

Eddie came up late, this year. He stepped off the train and brought a suitcase full of summer, and cursed us all out, as he usually did, for forgetting to save him his usual seat. There was a shadow behind his eyes, and he drank just a little too much, but everyone up top was blinded by the sunshine to look at him much.

One night, he was perched on a barstool as Ben was singing. Bev was there, her eyes on her man, but sometimes they would pull away and she would track other people around the room with a wary eye. Her gun shone in the barlight, and hidden up her sleeve was her silver-tipped knife. Old habits died hard for our girl, and she was slow to trust anyone else. Ben had worked his way under her skin only because he was patient, and kind, and _consistent_ in those things, a rock she could cling to in times of trouble. She couldn’t trust anyone else to be the same.

Ben sang like a songbird. He still wasn’t finished with his song, the one meant to bring back spring, make the flowers bloom the way they were meant to, but he had other songs. And when he sang, the whole room seemed to brighten.

“ _Lover tell me if you can  
Who’s gonna buy the wedding bands?  
Times being what they are,  
Hard and getting harder all the time._”

Eddie sat up straighter. It had been a long time since a room with him in it had brightened, and not for the first time, he almost wished Richie were here.

“ _Lover when I sing my song  
All the rivers’ll sing along,  
They’re gonna break their banks for us  
And with their gold be generous  
All a-flashin’ in the pan, all to fashion for your hand  
The rivers gonna give us the wedding bands._”

Now, of course this was a fanciful take. Ben and Beverly had once talked about this—what they could do for the wedding, times being what they were. “I don’t need a ring,” she had said, lying in bed with him when he brought it up, hesitantly. “I don’t need—a gift registry, or any kind of shit. Fuck, Ben, I don’t even know if I want to get married again.”

Ben wanted to get married to Bev. That was his dearest dream. But she had told him before of her no-good husband, and the bruises he left on her before she killed him. So instead he said, “It’s up to you.” He kissed her temple, and said, “I want to get married, but more than anything else, I want you to be happy. If you don’t want to get married, then we won’t.”

Beverly touched his face, and said, “This song of yours—is it really going to bring back the spring?”

Ben nodded.

“I want a spring wedding,” she said, tremulously, hardly daring to breathe for the impossibility of it. She _wanted_ it, so much that she could taste it: the spring breeze, the ocean air.

“Then we’re gonna have a spring wedding,” he said, simple as that.

“And—wedding rings from the rivers,” she said. “And the trees have to lay our wedding table, because god fucking knows, we can’t afford catering. And, god, I don’t know, a new mattress.”

“The birds’ll make it for us,” Ben promised, and Beverly laughed, soft and sweet. She pressed her head to his chest, and he stroked over her red, red hair, and he knew he would do all those things for her if he could.

He wrote all this into a song. He always looked at her when he sang it, and she smiled back, because she knew he meant every word, too. The rivers, the trees, the birds—maybe it was fanciful, maybe it was impossible. But Beverly knew he’d do his best by her, even in hard times. He sang with his heart on his sleeve, you see. And when you sing that way, everything you say is true.

Eddie didn’t know all this. Eddie only knew that this man sang like a dream, and he wished for a fleeting moment that Richie were here, to hear it too.

After that night, Eddie started timing the nights he came to my bar. He liked Ben’s songs, they reminded him of a time when he was much younger, and eventually he got around to liking Beverly too. It helped, that after he sidled up to her he told her he wished his husband were here, to hear this song with him. (And then he tried to match her shot for shot. I think the fact that she and Ben hauled him home so he could sleep off his hangover also was helpful.)

\--

“So how long are you planning to stay here?” Beverly asked, one summer day. She was lying on the grass in front of her and Ben’s little home, and Eddie was lying next to her, watching the clouds rolling past them. Unlike her, though, he had a blanket under him. She and Ben had found, very fast, that for all that Eddie was attuned to nature, he also _heavily_ disliked it when his bare skin touched the grass. Something about diseases, I guess.

Eddie’s mother, the previous keeper of the seasons, was not very good at parenting. We’ll leave it at that.

“By my count, about two more months,” said Eddie. “But I came up here a month late—husband kept me busy.” More to the point, Richie had begged Eddie to stay a month so he could see a new marvel just for him, a display of neon lights imitating the stars, but Eddie had come away from it resenting Derry all the more. “Sometimes I think I’m poisoning him somehow,” he confessed to her, quietly.

Beverly pushed herself up on her elbows. “How come?” she asked.

“He used to be kinder,” said Eddie.

“Has he ever—”

“Oh, god, no,” said Eddie, sitting up now to show her his unblemished arms, “I think Richie’d die first before he laid a finger on me. No, it’s just—he used to be happier, you know? We used to be happier.”

“There’s more than one way to hurt someone,” Beverly said, and she knew what she was talking about.

“I know him,” said Eddie, who did too. “Yeah, shit isn’t great between us right now, but fuck, I love him and he loves me. That was enough for him once.” He slumped back into the grass, and said, “I don’t know when it stopped being enough.”

Beverly didn’t say anything, just laid back down with him, feeling her cracked heart beat just that little bit faster as she thought about it. Would this simple, happy life one day not be enough for her, or for Ben? What happened if one day he decided he’d had enough of her? Certainly he’d never hit her, she knew him too well now, but she could easily imagine the strain between Eddie and his husband transposed onto her and Ben. A bird that wanted to fly free and a man, or a woman, too scared of the bird leaving—that wasn’t something that could end well.

But she had two more months to prepare, for the winter to come. Or at least, that was what she had thought.


	2. Any Way The Wind Blows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warnings:** implied drug usage. (Eddie is really smuggling drugs into a speakeasy he runs down below.) major character gets hit with hypothermia and their fate hangs in the balance.

The next time Eddie came to my bar, Richie was sitting at the bar counter, tapping his shiny shoe against the floor, watching the door for him.

“Surprise,” said Richie, the moment Eddie stepped through the door. I keep a hearth in the bar, because I like it when it gets warm—does a body good, warmth from a fireplace. Well, at that moment, I swear to you, the fire dimmed just that littlest bit, shrinking away like it didn’t want to watch this either. All my patrons ducked their heads and kept them low. I found an assortment of glasses that needed wiping behind the bar, but I kept my eye on them.

It would’ve been easier to despise Richie for coming to cut the summer short, if he didn’t look so damn _happy_ to see Eddie. Truly happy. Jazz hands and all, kind of happy. No matter what, he still loved him, and he always would. And we do such terrible things for love.

“What the fuck,” said Eddie, and Richie’s face fell. “No. Fucking— _six months_ , that’s the deal.”

“Maybe I just wanted to visit you,” said Richie, and this I knew was a lie. He leaned against the bar counter, all casual-like, but his fingers were drumming out an anxious beat on my countertop. He missed him. He wanted him back.

“You’re never just up here for a visit,” said Eddie. “You want me to come back early.”

Richie didn’t go quiet. Now that I think about it, ain’t like him to go quiet, ever. The man’s mouth is a locomotive, as is Eddie’s, which was probably why they were so well-matched in the first place—they were the only ones who could match each other’s near-limitless energy. But I saw his fingers speed up their tapping, which meant Eddie had caught the truth. “I missed you,” he said. “I got something new built just for you—electric lights that look like _stars_! Tell me that’s not the best thing you’ve ever heard, yeah?” He jumped up, took Eddie by the shoulders, and you could see in his eyes how much he wanted him back, wanted him home.

Eddie, for his part, just looked sick at the idea. “That’s not _right_ , and you know it,” he said, batting Richie’s hands off his shoulders. Richie held his hands up, but his face had fallen again. It’s a hard thing, to hear the truth laid bare just like that, and sometimes Eddie spoke the naked truth first before the thought occurred to him to at least try to dress it up a bit. Remember: most of the time, it takes two to make or break a marriage. There are cases like Bev’s no-good husband, on whose tombstone you could lay all the blame for their fucked-up marriage, but most of the time, like all things when you’re married, the blame for how it falls apart can be shared too. “It isn’t the same, it isn’t _natural_.”

“I’ve seen you fucking around in the garden,” said Richie. “You wear gloves ‘cause you hate it when you have to touch the dirt with your bare hands.”

“Because you could get all kinds of shit on your hands if you do!” Eddie said. “We’ve been _over this_ , Richie. You have to wear gloves when you’re gardening because you never know what could be lying in the dirt.” Then he paused, and said, “And it still isn’t _right_ , it wouldn’t be the same as the real stars.”

“You say that now, but you haven’t seen them yet,” said Richie. “They’ll be just as good, Eddie, I swear.” His hand came up to touch Eddie’s face, gentle and beseeching, and Eddie leaned against his touch. Smiled, small and real, because he loved this man, he truly did, although neither of them could remember the melody of it.

“Fine,” sighed Eddie. “I’ll come back with you, once I’ve gotten my shit together.” Then he touched his elbow, and said, “But first you have to stick around for a night. There’s this singer you need to listen to.”

And that, folks, was where the trouble started. Richie was a man who loved his husband so much that he would do just about anything for him, so when Ben came in, guitar in hand, and went up to the stage to sing his set—

Well, someone who could make Eddie want to stay just a little bit longer with his song, even when his husband came calling, was someone Richie was very interested in. He thought of contracts, of songbirds in gilded cages, of the ease with which he could bring a singer way down under the ground and keep him there. He thought of all that, but he kept it quiet, because it needed to be a surprise, and he needed the contract drawn up first. Needed it airtight, so tight you couldn’t squirm out of it.

The look on his face as he watched Ben take the stage and sing was contemplative. Anyone would’ve simply thought he was taking in the song, as was everyone else in the bar. Eddie did. Beverly, who shadowed Ben, fearful of losing him to drunken bar patrons or the fates’ cruel whims, did too.

“ _You take me in your arms  
And suddenly there’s sunlight all around me  
Everything bright and warm  
And shining like it never did before…_”

Beverly’s words. Our girl didn’t know what to do with a love like Ben’s, like sunshine after a cold winter, like a garden beginning to bloom, like a little house with a hearth that kept them warm. But she wanted to keep it. She dug her fingers in to keep it, like she did with her few possessions, so scared was she to lose this love, to lose him.

And that was something Richie knew.

“ _I don’t know how or why  
Or who am I that I should get to hold you  
But when I saw you all alone against the sky  
It’s like I’d known you all along…_”

Ben’s words. Once upon a time, people used to pick on him for—well, damn near everything. His weight, his music, his dreams, his mother’s hard work, his absent father. Things like that have a way of digging under your skin, and you either turn cold and cruel with time, or you try to be kind and good, so good no one will ever feel the need to leave you. Ben did not have it in him to be cruel, or snow-cold. So he went the other way instead, and all that time kept his hurts under the surface—his doubts that he could be loved, the way he wanted to be. How selfish it seemed, to a poor boy like him, to want to be loved that way.

But Beverly smiled at him, and maybe that was all right.

Richie heard his words, heard his song. Heard about love, soft and pure and sweet, and thought, _I could make a gift of this._

But later.

The set finished. Richie and Eddie got up to go, and Bev called, “Wait—Eddie, I thought you had more time!”

“Who’s she?” Richie asked.

“My friend,” Eddie explained, and pulled away from his husband to go hug his friend. “I’m so sorry,” he said, letting go of her, “but Richie came up early, he wanted me to see something. I wish I could stay, Bev, you know I fucking do. Derry’s a bunch of stiffs.” He turned and called to me, “Hestia! I need—something to tide me over in the wintertime!”

“Well, hold your horses!” I called back, and stashed a few gifts into his suitcase: a lot of whiskey—more than one man could drink even in six months—and a great deal of drugs. Far as I knew, though, the drugs weren’t for him. All Eddie would ever tell me was that he ran a place for the people of Derry to escape their worries for a little while, but that was enough information for me.

But if the man skimmed—well. I didn’t know that for sure, but I suspected.

Richie shifted around where he stood, uncomfortable and impatient. His fingers twitched towards Eddie’s elbow, but then he shoved his hands into the pockets of his longcoat, pulled his collar up. Already the cold winds were beginning to howl, and Beverly’s and Ben’s eyes were darting the door, alarmed. It was too soon. Everyone could see it. It hadn’t been six months. It hadn’t even been five.

“It’s too soon,” Ben said, anxiously. “Hey, man, listen, can’t you—”

“Sorry, singer,” said Richie, breezily, shrugging as though he couldn’t do anything about it, “got places to go.” He called, “Eduardo, _andale!_ ”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fucking coming, dickhead, just let me get all my stuff!”

\--

When Eddie left, he took the summer with him. Winter came howling in to take its place, twice as bitterly cold as it had been before. And it had been _bad_ before. For the first time since Ben and Beverly met, the hearth in their little house could not be fed enough wood to keep it going. There wasn’t enough food, because there hadn’t been enough _time_ to get food together.

I did what I could. I helped keep their fire going, as I was helping keep so many other fires going, but I couldn’t do anything about the food, or the clothes, or the howling winds that ate at your spirits whenever you went outside. My domain was always the hearth and the home. Those days, I wished I was lady of more than that. Lady of deer. Lady of water. Lady of fur. Something that could keep a body going, maybe.

Mike Hanlon was the station master for the train to Derry, and when the winter set in, he and a few other people had to make sure that the rails were free of snow and other debris, so the train could stay on time. Always had to be kept clean, those rails, they had to carry the train that could carry more poor souls down, down, down. Most of the time, he came to my bar downright exhausted, needing some sleep and a hot drink by the fire. Once, he mentioned, in Beverly’s hearing, that he needed more hands—so many of his employees had been lured away from the station by Richie’s offers.

“Even when they damn well know better,” he said, seated in the plush armchair I keep by the fire. “I keep telling them, there’s something in that town that _changes_ you.”

“I imagine that’s the endless work,” I said, making him a hot toddy.

“Yeah, that doesn’t help,” said Mike, “but that’s not what I meant.” When I put the mug in his hands, I caught sight of Beverly, listening in from her table. Ben had stayed home, because he wanted to work on his song, the one that was meant to bring the spring back. Mike leaned forward, unmindful of our eavesdropper, and said, “Something cursed lives in that town. Something hungry.”

“How are you so sure about that?” I asked him, stoking the fire.

“I get letters from my friend Bill,” said Mike, which was a surprise. Letters didn’t go in and out of Derry. The patrols were too strict for that down there, and we didn’t even have a post office up here. Which meant someone was smuggling letters back and forth, between Mike and dear old Bill, who’d left for Derry on his little brother’s heels. “He’s been telling me that something in Derry is _off_. That more and more people have been going mysteriously missing, lately.” His fingers drummed against the mug, and he said, “He’s trying to organize an effort to find them, but you know what it’s like down there.”

“Everyone’s keeping their heads low and not looking anyone else in the eye,” I said. I’d come down to Derry myself a few times, but less frequently these days. Even then I’d seen the rot seeping in, the people keeping their heads low, turning suspicious eyes on each other—but never looking each other in the eye. That Bill was still trying anyway said something, about how resilient he was.

“Yeah,” said Mike. “I hate this, Hestia. I never have enough people on hand, now. I can’t pay them enough for the work, and Richie keeps luring them away.”

Then Beverly said, “I can work.”

Mike turned to look at her, and said, “I’m—sorry, what?”

“I can work,” she said. “I need the work. And I need the money, however much that’ll be.” She looked out the door, and outside the winter wind was blowing so hard I half-feared it would blow the door down and the windows open.

“It’ll be hard work,” Mike cautioned her. “I won’t ask more than you can give, but you look like you’ve seen—and done—some shit. I think you can give a lot. Right?”

Beverly nodded. “I’m no stranger to hard work,” she said. “And I’m not going to Derry any time soon.”

“Good,” said Mike.

And so it was that Beverly took up the role of station master’s assistant. Mike hadn’t lied—it was hard work, and he paid her just about enough to support herself and Ben, who was still working on his song. Had been blocked on the song, now, and had taken to occasional walks to and from the bar, collar turned up against the howling winds, to get the ideas going again. Every time he went walking, though, Bev nearly tore her hair out in frustration, because she knew the dangers of the cold winter. She knew just what a blizzard could do to a body.

But she was bringing in the money now. “You can stay home,” she said, “you can work there, you don’t have to go back and forth from the bar all the time.”

“I need a change of scenery,” he’d explained, hanging up his scarf and jacket, and Beverly had cursed him out for that need. Never fall in love with writers, folks and fellows. Even the kind ones have this problem—they always think they’re a little bit invincible. “And I do have to work too.”

“You need to _stay inside_ ,” she had said.

“I have to _do something_ besides stay in,” said Ben. “If I can help at Hestia’s in some way, then I will. Anyway, it isn’t that far.”

“It’s _too fucking far!_ ”

“You work at the station!”

“They pay me well!”

“Hestia pays me well too!”

“You can’t work on your song if you’re frozen half to death!”

“I can’t work on my song if we’re both freezing inside the house, either!”

And so on, and so forth. Even the best relationships hit a rocky patch, and Ben and Beverly were no exception to this. They both wanted each other to be safe and warm and, most importantly, out of the winds blowing cold and harsh into town. Ben was a poor boy, he’d seen what the cold did to people caught unprepared.

But when the blizzard came to town, well.

Everyone got caught unprepared.

\--

I’ve told you that there was something dark in Derry, yes? Well, that something was always hungry: for more fear, more despair, more, more, _more_. There was never any satisfying it—if it was done with one meal it would strike out immediately for another one, and while it had no shortage of meals down below, it always wanted more. And it knew how to get more: drive people from above to below.

So it brewed up a storm. A big one—stones of ice bigger than a man’s fist, winds that howled louder than a wolf pack at the full moon, cold so bitter and cruel that you didn’t know you lost a limb until you came in from the cold and saw you’d lost your hand. And those were the lucky ones. You could lose more than that to the cold that kicked up.

No one saw the blizzard coming. That was its special thing—it could make you ignore the signs in front of you until it was too late, and you were in the middle of the storm.

Beverly was working on the tracks when the storm hit. She ran back to the station and took cover with Mike and the other assistants, all of them shivering in terror as the hail rained down around them. Mike counted the heads of all his assistants, and breathed a sigh of relief that they were all here.

“You should stay here in the station,” he said, “until this blizzard passes.” But god, and the dark thing in the heart of Derry, only knew when that blizzard would pass, and everyone knew it. Times like these, storms could last far, far longer than they should.

“I can’t stay,” said Beverly.

“What?” Mike asked.

“I can’t stay,” she said, again. “Ben—If he’s not at home he’s probably at Hestia’s. I have to check.”

“Bev,” said Mike, sternly. “Bev, there’s a fucking storm outside, you can’t just go out there—”

Beverly shrugged on her coat, pulled on the gear she used whenever she went out working on the roof of the station, or the tracks, or anywhere that could be potentially dangerous. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and she prayed she sounded more confident than she felt. “I’ve weathered worse storms than this.”

Mike reached for her to stop her, tried to beg her to stay, tried to reassure her Ben was all right, but Beverly slipped out of his reach and was gone like a summer breeze. She wound the scarf around her neck, set the hard hat on her head, and pulled her collar up against the wind. Then she walked out.

Foolish girl, I know. We’re all thinking that. But she loved this man, and she knew he could be spite-stubborn if he wanted to be. She knew he could dig his heels in and be unmoved no matter what she tried. She needed to see him safe, and she needed to touch him, to hold him, to keep him in her arms so he wouldn’t slip away from her. And when a need like that overtakes you, there’s no way to stop yourself.

She walked out into the storm. She didn’t come back to the station.

Mike called me the second five minutes had passed. His phone still worked, and so did mine, but ours were the only ones around for miles that still worked well enough to do their jobs. “Beverly’s gone out into the storm,” he said, frantically.

I sat up on my stool. Ben, who was working on his song on the bar counter, singing _la la la la la la la_ and coaxing spring blossoms into coming out of the cracks in the wood, went horribly, terribly still.

“She what?” I said.

“She’s out in the storm looking for Ben,” said Mike. “You have to find her. I don’t know how long this will last, but I know for a fact that _she_ won’t, not in something like this.”

Ben had never looked paler in his life. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Out,” I said. I rushed out from behind the counter, pulled on my coat, and pulled up the hood of it. I am an old, old woman, and my time has long passed, but I know a few tricks from then. This storm wouldn’t hurt me. This storm didn’t want me, I could feel it in my bones. This storm had been conjured by something hungry for fear and despair, but I tended to the hearth at every home. I knew warmth too well to give in to the cold. “Stay _here_ ,” I told him.

“But she’s out there in this blizzard and who fucking knows what—” Ben started.

“I don’t need you to follow on my heels,” I said. “You wouldn’t help. I need you to stay here and keep the fire going.” I swept my hand out, to show him all the people huddled up inside, too. “These people are going to need warmth,” I said. “She’s going to need warmth. Keep this fire _going_ , Ben Hanscom.”

For a moment I thought Ben would object, the fool. But his shoulders slumped, and he looked around him, at the people gathered around tables, under blankets, trying to stay as warm as they could.

“Okay,” he said. “Go.”

I went. I’d wasted enough time already.

When I say the storm was cold, I mean it was _cold_. It wasn’t a natural cold, either. It was a hateful cold, almost _gleeful_ in its hate, a cold that not only sank into the marrow of your bones, but wanted to rip them out of you and break them open too. I could feel it, I did, but I gathered my strength and remembered the warmth of the hearth and trudged on, looking for a flash of red hair. The winds howled around me, whipped at my face so hard I half-thought I’d go blind with it, and wasn’t that a bad way to go. But I had to try. I had to make sure Bev was still alive, although that hope was vanishing little by little as the storm raged on around me.

And then I saw her.

She could’ve been easily missed. The snow had fallen on her, where she had collapsed, just blocks away from my bar. She was coming there to see Ben, I knew at once, and the cold had gotten in deep. Deep enough that her lips were turning blue, and I rushed to her side and brushed the snow off her face, off her body, scared of the worst.

I needn’t have been. When I checked, her pulse was still there—a faint, thready, feeble thing, but it still beat under my fingers. I pressed my lips to hers, and breathed the warmth of the hearth back into her body. Not a lot, just enough that she stirred again, and I could haul her up and try to keep her warm. I didn’t like her chances of getting out of this without a touch of frostbite, and come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I liked my own chances of staying out here in the cold. Something about this blizzard spooked me, I won’t lie. Something about the cold of it felt almost spiteful.

The two of us limped back together to my place. Well, I limped, and carried her as best as I could. The wind howled around us, and I could swear I heard it snarling at me: _**how dare you steal her from me, how dare you take my prize, how dare you pull this morsel away, you whose time has passed, you who deluded yourself into believing you have a part to play still, you who should have gone with the rest of your brethren.**_ But I grit my teeth, and I kept going, though my feet sank into the snow and the hail tried to strip my own face off.

Beverly hadn’t stirred as much the whole way. Her lips had turned a shade of blue that didn’t look right on a living body, and she was barely breathing. When I pushed the doors open and we got her down on a couch, she didn’t even move a muscle.

“Bev!” Ben said, rushing to her side. He clasped her hand in his, unmindful of the cold. “Bev? Beverly? Come on, wake up.” He looked up at me, and I saw the eyes of a young boy, distressed at the possibility of losing the girl he loved. “Why isn’t she waking up?” he asked me.

“She was out in the cold too long,” I said. “Help me get her closer to the fire.”

We got her closer to the fire, as close as I dared. We got scissors to cut her soaked clothes off her, and blankets to cover her up, so many blankets that she looked like a tiny mound. Someone brewed up something warm and stuffed it into a bottle, and I pressed it to her neck, to warm her up.

And the whole time, Ben held her hand. He only moved away to let us work, me and the other patrons, to let us pull her back from the brink, but otherwise he could not be moved from her side. Sometimes I even caught him singing to her, softly: _la la la la la la…_

A flower shot up through a crack in the wood below them.


End file.
